Add Skills Playing on ApnaCircle (Part I)

After a few very unique features like the profile timeline (very much talked in the media as a career visualization feature), online contact cards build and share and a smart feature in the smart news; ApnaCircle.com is getting ready to launch a very unique and interesting way to add skills on your profile. The feature itself hasn't been officially announced by ApnaCircle yet. Seems like they are in a testing mode but our team was able to sneak past in what currently is still under the cloud and get a glimpse of this interesting feature.


Skills Welcome

This is how the Welcome page looks like. There is also a menu bar on top of the page and a pretty empty footer line; both not shown in the above image. The footer doesn't need any space in this post for now, however the menu is detailed in a section below in this post. The welcome page is pretty simple, nicely explained and put down.


Skills Menu
The menu present on all the pages looks like this. There is also a site logo there but it looks 

like that still needs some work so we will leave it there and wait till its ready to be put down on this post. Getting back to the menu, as you see here, pretty simple and straight options that we explain next. The rest of the top bar contains some other links, we will come back to soon.
Play
Got confused on what this is doing here? ApnaCircle introduces skills where you add skills to your profile for your benefit but (as explained on the welcome screen image) where your contacts also benefit by being in your circle of network. We weren't able to see this page as the eligibility still remains to be fulfilled. But from the explanations from the welcome page, it

looks like that for the skill chosen you are prompted to vote in between your contacts (from a pack of 3 at a time). So for a particular skill that you are playing for you choose a contact that you think is the most skilled from the pack of 3 presented to you. The more you play the more points you may get (as shown in the right side of this image). Ideally, the person you voted for should also be benefited in terms of his tally of points. No way to know currently as we ourselves were not able to play the game. We are a bit curious about the big ? that you see in a dotted circle on the top right of the image. Our guess is that its a place holder for the position(Rank) that you may hold for that particular skill. Quite a few of the text that you see here is in French. That may be since the feature is still in testing mode, plus ApnaCircle' parent company as you may recall from our other post is Viadeo, which is based out of France. Our chrome translator failed us for once here. Although we are sure the age will pretty soon be available in English.
Skills

This is the page where you add your skills.  As you see in our case, there were already some skills available. Well, they seems to have been picked up from the Keywords that we have in our profile. So, yes  good way to use some already existing data and that also means that you should start cleaning your Keywords as you soon will have to deal with this feature we are describing.

As you start tying in to add your skills, the application provides suggestions based on your input and we got a feel of the Google home page. The auto suggestions mention the skill names and (may be) the number of people already having that skill in their profile. Again, a very nice way to make things easier for users. You also have some suggestions already lined up on the right side of the page. Just a click on the plus sign adds it up.
Each block of a particular skill is nicely laid out. With a text area to specify the details you may want to add to that skill. Which in turn, seems like, will be helpful once your contacts start voting for you. And there again, the big ? sits there, cementing more our hunch that it will be used as your rank placeholder. There is one more interesting thing in here that we will let you to pick and wonder about. 
Ranking
Feel free to check the rankings for one and all of your skills that you have in your profile.

We still have some work to do on displaying any data on this page. But here on your left is how it will display initially. You may choose the skills from the drop on the top of the page. This drop will be available on nearly all of the internal pages that you access from the top menu bar.
You also, will have option to see the Ranking from either only your contacts or all the site users.
A couple of useful links sit at the bottom right corner of the page. Once in you may get the help and tips from there.
Vote
Ahh and we hate to tell you that we still are looking to get inside this page as well :(

Here on this page you will be able to see who voted for you and may be more things!

The other blocks and placeholder are pretty much the same as the other pages. So, we will leave you with the image here. Take notice of the targets that the application gives you: "Next badge in 3 votes" 
Okay lets make once more hunch, seems you will get these kind of small goals on most of the pages here. This of course s a good way to increase the user's interactivity and let them go on and on. These small goals will mean user will want to continue sing the feature and also come back to chase them; both ways increasing the site' interactivity and user stay.


More Menu
Apart from this, like we said earlier, there are 2 more menu items. One for the language and the other for a few more items. The language one you are already familiar with from our 

profile timeline post, so we omit that one here. The other user options includes; Preference, Help and Logout. Excuse our translation here, but like we said the pages are still in French so we couldn't help more.
The Logout that you see as the third sub-menu just takes you out of this Skills feature. Once you click on it, you will be back on ApnaCircle' Dashboard. We still are unclear on why they chose to name the link as Logout, since this feature seems pretty much part of teh main portal; at least as of now. We will be keeping an eye on this for sure! 
The Help is a FAQ page, where as usual you will be able to check for some basic start up questions that you may have based on your initial interaction with the feature.
The Preference menu is the most interesting one here, as you may see in the image next. Here you authorize the application that it may use the data this  

features collects about you to put you in some sort of a rank with the head hunters on the portal. This is very useful for all job seekers out there. So pay all the attention here.
Also, mentioned is the on-off feature which when switched on (like in the image here), lets the application put some posts on your dashboard (for your contacts to view) about your activity with this feature. Smart move again!


The Badges, Finally!
Ok, we talked about a big ? and some badges. So here they are!
We found this somewhere and this is how we came to figure out the ApnaCircle Skills feature.

Wherever they do ;), this is how they display. As you see for obvious reasons, we have to grey out a few things here. The colored circles are the badges that we have been talking about all through this post. A maximum of 3 badges show up and the rest are hidden only to be shown on the click of View all of their skills link visible near the bottom of the image.
The section although small is pretty nicely detailed and accompanied by the small colored stand out images. we will show how soon how the 1st and 2nd rank badges look like, but as you may have guessed, they are appropriately colored :).
Also detailed is the number of recommendations that a user may have received for a particular skill (greyed here) for which the respective badges have been earned by the same user.
Right below is the link to the ApnaCircle Skills page.

And like we promised here is the badge for the 2nd spot. Seems pretty much a silver medal is it? Well it ought to be since you are playing a game here and its pretty much obvious that the badges be what they really are, medals. Bronze, Silver and yes the 

precious gold. Looking at their sizes they are nicely draped in metallic colors and well shaped. There are a few things to figure out yet on the application's logic part on how it decides to push a user up the ranking. That obviously will be once we start making ourselves more familiar with the feature. We already are excited to try it out in its entirety once we have an official word on the feature. Hopefully that will be some time soon!

Our Views
The feature, we have said it time n again in this post, is very unique and interactive. This is a good way to keep the user addictive to the site and also make sure user inputs the profile data with some serious thinking. If you think from a job seeker perspective, we would like to be in the top 10 if not in the top 3 for a particular Skills rankings. User will find it easy to get adapted after an initial feel. We are sure there would be competition in the network with people always making sure to stay on top of other users in their circle. The application will need to be fast and a quick publisher. We are yet to find out if the badges earned will display somewhere on the public profile. Recruiters will find it a informative feature as well, since the head hunting will get some tips based on the tips. However, how the data flow will be to and from Recruiters will only be seen once the feature is open for all.

A few of the things that we noticed (although we know its still in the testing mode):

1. The ability for anyone else out of the development team to sneak into the feature should have been taken care of. We are not sure how many already have seen the feature when they are not intended to. With the application being only in French this is just going to put off the user, no user appreciates a feature not yet ready being shown to him/her, and this is a dangerous bug!
2. The Logout, as we pointed out earlier, only throws you out of the feature to the main Dashboard, we think it should have been a different flow; or may be the label should have been different.
3. The footer looks really left alone. It is as if that part of the page hasn't been noticed by the developers. Or may be that they are confident enough on the feature that the user will not feel like scrolling down. But still, there is enough space out there that could be utilized.
4. We will wait for the feature to open for all and see how user reacts to this one. There is some time as the text will need to be available in English and some work on the header logo part. Whatever and whenever, don't forget that it was here that you got the first glimpse of the feature ;)

Happy Crunching or rather for this one, Happy Adding Skills Playing on ApnaCircle and don't forget to vote for us once you start on this!!

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Thank Google Plus Friends For Plus One-ing

After getting the Search Plus Your World out there, Google has now started out a way to let you thank your contacts (more specifically people in your circles) for +1-ing a particular page that may have turned up in your search results. The below image shows you how the link is

placed in your search results. This obviously shows up only when you are logged in to your Google account (and in turn your G+ account). As you can see, the links reads Thanks Them or Thank Mr XYZ based on if the page was +1'ed by more than one person of your circle or a single person. This feature in turn becomes part of the Search Plus Your World that Google is so much focusing on at the moment. 

Clicking on the Thank ...  link brings up the normal share to Google Plus layer. We captured one for you here for the same result shown in the image above. The layer, as you see here, is 

structured to show your appreciation to your contacts who +1'ed the result in the first place.

You could obviously include more people (and/or circles) in the Thank post here, which may be out of context here but still is included; in case you need to share it with someone else.

This however is a good little way to be more social (and professional too) in your circles. So the next time you find a good page in your searches, don't forget to Thank those who helped Google know that the page is more relevant to be shown to you for the search that you made. This of course if you haven't noticed is a way for you to make sure you have people who matters in your circles and to know (obviously) who liked what!!

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Google Plus Updates Mobile UI and Provides Support For Locales

Google plus finally makes some updates to the mobile version of the app. The updates were rolled out last Monday as announced by their APM. The announcement comes nearly a month after the Android app for Google plus was updated with some major changes as we reported here. The stream view is gets a redesigned with NearBy and WhatsHot being accessed in a much cleaner way, just like the Android app. But what seems to be missing out is the main stream like we see today on the Desktop version of Google plus.

The home screen will present a much cleaner view now as you see in the image provided on the left.
[Image Credit: Post from Google AM]
The updates now look very much close to the Android app updates but the users of iPad will have to may be wait for some more time as there is still no word on the iPad app for Google plus.
There obviously area few more things Google still needs to look at. People aren't really that happy with the the app still using user's email id to call them within the app. We agree there should be an update to let the app call us by our own name; especially with the real name policy that Google has in place and there was so much fuss created about it in the first place.
If you still wondering where the email id is, you may see in the footer of the image on the left here. We blurred the email id for obvious reason but you got the point ;)


Before we finish out this post, we would just like to mention that with this update Google plus is now accessible in sixty more locales. Now you may share your content in Bengali, Icelandic and many more.
So what are you waiting for, go on and try out the new updates and access the features using plus.google.com in your mobile browser. We are sure you will like the updates but if there is something that you think is still missing, the comment section is always there for you and we are all ears!!
Happy Crunching!

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Android Market Rechristened To Google Play

If you are one of the many who speculated Google Play to be some kind of an Android device, don't kill us if we disappoint you with a contrasting update here. With all the speculations about Google Play, Android Market has been laid to rest(just the name). No, don't go in to dangerous and heart breaking thoughts; the application has just been renamed to, you got it, Google Play.
There isn't much to it apart from Android market being rechristened. If however you look closely, there are a few other reasons why Google did this. You will get all familiar things that you were used to with Android Market and many others. Google thought to make the market place a one-stop-shop for all your entertainment needs. So as you see in the image here (web version), apart from applications you now will have Music, Books and Movies too. 

So the next time when you buy a book online, you will have the luxury to start the read on your laptop/android tablet and continue it on your Android smart-phone since now your library will be accessible through the cloud storage that Google Play comes with. The page may have different options based on your location. Here is from the official word from Google blog:
"In the U.S., music, movies, books and Android apps are available in Google Play. In Canada and the U.K., we’ll offer movies, books and Android apps; in Australia, books and apps; and in Japan, movies and apps. Everywhere else, Google Play will be the new home for Android apps."

And for all of you who carry the Android smart-phones so often, Google has this Play Store (that's what they now call it in the android app section)there too. If you haven't yet already seen it, just try searching your old pal Android market on your smart-phone and chances are you wouldn't find it at all. The new icon has been labelled Play Store. For a moment it ditched us too in the search as we were looking either in the G or the M line of app drawer on our Android devices.
 

The move seems to have been timed for a cause. The search giant' Google digital media services on the web underscores a key concept that the search giant is hoping to drive home. It is known that the media ecosystem that Google has created wasn't meant only for Android devices, but for users of all stripes. Although when will Google TV be able to use the Play Store like services, is still unknown. The search giant themselves are yet to open up on this. We wait on a word on that as well!
By the way, don't be surprised to see more apps being rechristened with a new logo like this. One that we know is Google Music, which is now Play Music. Any more that you could find or know about, let us know in the comments section! 
Happy Crunching!

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One For Acquisitions and Partnerships

It seems to be a season of acquisitions and partnerships in the social media world! We chose three favorite ones of all that we noticed in the past few months. Here we go and they are mentioned in the chronological order.

You all are familiar with the professional portal ApnaCircle that we have been reporting a few news about. Most recently about the introduction of profile timeline on the site and a very useful feature that the online business cards are. ApnaCircle is a Viadeo Group company, which also involves Tianji from China. Viadeo is reported to have acquired ApnaCircle somewhere in 2009. Viadeo recently partnered with Mancx, a Q&A expert, to join the knowledge market. The partnership took place in early December 2011. Mancx thus became a premium partner for Viadeo, allowing the 40 million Viadeo users across the globe to tap into Mancx’s extended network of professionals. If you love sharing and gathering information, just log on to Mancx with your ApnaCircle/Viadeo credentials.

The social media giant, Facebook, acquired a Team Behind Eye Tracking Start-up GazeHawk. Eye tracking technology normally requires some special hardware but this team supposedly uses only your webcam. Advertisers who would like to optimize their site can use the technology to achieve the same. The team just uses a link or two, that the site owners will provide them, to identify (using a webcam) what in your site catches your eye.  Advertisers can then study the results to optimize your site. The relief here is that, users will opt-in and they won't be forced in to anything by Facebook; neither will there be any spying. It seems the team will start with Facebook next week.

Remember Posterous? The blogging and sharing platform that early on was locking its horns with Tumblr, is said to be acquired by the Twitter. Posterous was known for the way it combined email and other handles to provide users a way to post content on their platform from any web applications. It was only last year that the company released SPACES, a way to privately share your online photos with your closed ones! Below is what both  Posterous and Twitter commented about the SPACES service:
"Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption. We’ll give users ample notice if we make any changes to the service. For users who would like to back up their content or move to another service, we’ll share clear instructions for doing so in the coming weeks."

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Connect Google Plus To Blogger

Do you have a blog? If the answer is a big yes, then this post is for you. However, even if the answer is a No, read on as looking at the way Google is integrating all its products in one linear path, it may not be long that you will need to know this.
We are sure you must have landed on some blog while searching or exploring some topic/news and then getting the blog links as search results on the Google search results page. And then while commenting on them with your Google account, you must have been disgusted seeing the plain old Blogger profile link of yours showing there as a result of that comment publish! So how about seeing your Google profile in there with the awesome image that you already posted for your Gmail account? Sounds great, right! We agree, well here is a step by step description of how to achieve that.
We mentioned Gmail, but its exactly your Google plus profile that comes up now. Should be better anyway :) 
Login to Blogger to land on the dashboard of the product. If you are still using the old interface of Blogger (and we don't blame you for that, even we still love it), you will need to switch to the new interface for sometime. The link will be available on the old interface dashboard. Once you are on the interface, you will see the image that we posted above. From there on its a simple ride, as you may already have guesses. If however you are not able to see the image, just follow the link tat we have provided to you with the image above (just click on it). Here is the link again!
The next page will have you see how the switch will be. So you will see the below on the

page with a few more details, a check box for your content and a Switch Now button to move to next step.
Make sure you read all details provided here on this second step so you know what you are going in to. The transition is reversible but its always good to know what you are doing. Once you are satisfied with what you see and read, check the checkbox and click the button. You will be asked to provide your password as a mode of confirmation.
That is all but done! You will see this image (next) if all was well. Which should be as there

wasn't much to do anyway. As you see after we moved from our Blogger profile, we now have the name from our Google Plus profile showing up in our blogger admin pages. From the settings drop available on the right top, you should now be able to switch 

back to the old blogger interface, where as you see in or case you will now have a change of name (if your blogger earlier name was different than the one in your Google plus profile) and a confirmation message at the bottom which tells you now and after on that you are sing your Google plus profile in your blog. Also from the settings drop from the new interface, you should also see a link that will revert the changes that you just did (just in case you need to).
This is really all you need to do to move to Google plus profile. From now on as you post some comment on any blog, you will see your Google plus profile details (image, name and link) there. Which should also link to your profile on Google plus, thus making more sense!
One last thing that you may need to check is that the new profile has all details and correct ones. If you were already using Google plus, this shouldn't be an issue. But in case you need some changes just go to your edit profile page in Google plus and make changes as you may need. Now your blogger profile widget will link to this new profile, so in case you want any earlier detail to show up, make the changes as we just told you to. 
The major benefit will be (this will take some time, depending on Google updates/indexation), that people seeing your blog posts will then have your profile pic displayed there within the search results. And obviously you will have only a single profile to maintain.

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Social Media And QR Codes

We presume(and excuse us for that), that many of us still do not know what a QR Code is! So first and foremost in this post, we will try to explain what this thing is. Then we will see, how you may see them for your benefits finally ending up this small post on how it fits in social media.
We all are very familiar with our old linear friends that we often see people at the shop and malls PoS (Point of Sales) scanning to let the systems know the price and other details of the items that yo may be buying from the shop. If you haven't guessed it yet, we are talking about the Bar Codes. They are still very popular among us at all the PoS and sit pretty nicely on nearly all of the products/items that you buy, online or otherwise. 

What quite a few of us are not aware of it that our this old friend now has a sibling (and a pretty advanced one).
QR codes, a short form for Quick Response codes, is a 2 dimensional code (also known as matrix code). They were born in Japan, where they are very common, in fact people were using them there before the rest of the world became aware of their existence. They may include information like; plain text, links, a whole contact card with name..number and other details, a URL. In short a whole lot other and more information that their other sibling can hold or store. They are a scan-able image that you may scan with your smartphone apps. The apps are generally referred to as QR code readers. The one that we are really fond of on or iPhone is this. For your information on how a QR code may look like, here (on your left) is a QR with our simple details. Feel free to scan it with your smart-phones.

So now that we have a little info on what a QR code is, lets move on to the next part; what good they are anyway?

Slowly but surely, they are gaining momentum. People are getting aware of them and since they could hold more info than a bar code, you could not only store more information in them but information of different kinds. For example, now a days you will find these on paper media (promotion), business cards(promotion), products(promotion). Like you see here on the left image(purposefully blurred), the idea is a different kind of promotion. So while people never cared about reading anything more than the type of ingredients and mfg date on some edible items, companies have moved on to introduce the QR codes on their product wrappers, with a marketing idea of guiding users to scan them and thus taking them to a different promotion page on their smart-phones. Another example (not shared here) that we fond was of a online portal that had QR code accompanying their newspaper advertisement. Again, a very good marketing idea.
So how do you as an individual can make use of it? For a start, QR are very rarely but smartly found on business cards. That way your business card will have all contact details printed, but also a QR with the same details so if someone wishes, they may scan the code and store you as a contact in their smart phones without them typing anything. Oh yes, we are aware that there are some smart phones card reader apps available; but hey did't we mention you could store different type of information in a QR? So why only the contact details. Feel free to put down your blog or website URLs which once scanned will take the user to your site. Also, if you have a website that you maintain, QRs are a good way to put some fresh content on your site. Sooner or later the search engines will see and read them. Which will benefit your pages.This just broadens the marketing ways. 


So what else do you think you may put down in a QR code? Let us know the interesting ideas in the comments!
Our Views
We did mention that QRs could be used to put down on a business card with different details, or on ones website pages in a way to provide both; a way for your users a ease of info retrieval and fresh content for search engines to index/crawl. But there is also a very interesting use that the social media may put the QRs to!
If you were attentive in the post, you must remember that we mentioned a professional portal using them in their paper media Ad. Good idea yes, but why not use the QR codes on the important pages. For example, on a professional media platform like ApnaCircle, where the public profile pages are really important due to the nature of the platform, you could always put the QR codes on the respective profile pages with a URL to that user's public profile. Before you think what use it may be, here is a scenario:
A recruiter carrying a smart-phone (very likely) may scan and save the QR for some profiles that may suit the job profile(s) that the company may be head hunting for. Thus he/she always carry the shortlisted profiles with them which provides a way for them to refer or go through the profiles when not near their workstations or laptops. This however, is just one scenario. And yes don't forget that this is a good way to ask Google to come back and re-index the profiles since you will provide fresh content on the profiles(by changing the QR as necessary from time to time).
Give it a thought and keep Crunching!!

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